The access classification level determines the 'read access' right assigned to a group of people for a given document or series of documents.

The following access classification levels are used at the Council of Europe:

- Public: applies to unclassified documents, for public dissemination.

- Restricted: applies to documents made available to member governments and the Secretariat of the Council of Europe.

- Internal: applies to documents that are accessible to all internal users, i.e. staff of the Council of Europe.

- Confidential: applies to documents which can be accessed only by a specific group of internal users and, if applicable, external users defined by their roles. As regards official documents, for example, this group consists of member governments and the department or committee responsible for the document.

- Secret: applies to documents which can be accessed only by a specific group of persons, who are listed by name and given authorisation by the secretariat or body concerned (Council of Europe Secretariat, Committee of Ministers or Parliamentary Assembly). Paper copies are numbered individually.

These levels are based on Committee of Ministers decision CM/Del/Dec(98)641 and the 2009 Archival Policy.

A controlled vocabulary is a restricted list of terms (words or phrases) used for indexing (tagging) and retrieving content. It is controlled in order to compensate for the ambiguity and diversity of natural language. There are different types of vocabularies, which differ according to the relationships between terms. A controlled vocabulary usually makes use of equivalent terms (synonyms, etc.) which point to the preferred term. It may also have hierarchical or associative relationships between terms.

   Coucil of Europe controled vocabularies on vocabularies.coe.int

Action to be taken at the end of a record’s lifecycle. The following disposition types are used in the Council of Europe's Retention and Disposal Schedules:

- Preservation : to be kept permanently. For paper records this implies transferring them to the Archives.

- Destruction: the destruction of paper records or the deletion of digital records. When digital records are deleted, all copies and back-ups should also be deleted or made unreadable.

· Review of retention: this means that the retention period has to be reviewed, for example when a process is new and has to be tested, or when a new process is to be introduced in the near future.

· Review for useful information: this should be used when some documents in the series might still be valuable as information resources after the expiry of the retention period. It does not necessarily mean that they are of permanent or even archival value. The same retention period should be used at regular intervals, if required. For example, if a record is kept for 5 years and contains information which is still of value at the end of that period, an additional 5-year retention period should be added on.

- Review for preservation: to be used when some records (not the whole series) might have archival value at the end of the retention period. This will depend on the nature of the record series and the activity. It should also be used in the case of sampling.

Metadata is structured information that describes, explains, locates, or otherwise makes it easier to retrieve, use, preserve or manage an information resource. This makes Metadata an essential tool for managing information resources. It can be considered as a document’s identity card.

The term metadata can refer to the metadata elements or fields (e.g. title, date) or to the values used in those fields (e.g. Activity report on national minorities in Europe, 12/12/2015).

The term 'record' covers any document created or received by the Council of Europe in the course of its activities that provides evidence of decisions or action taken. Records may take the form of texts, publications, images or audiovisual recordings, in either physical or electronic form.

The term 'record' must be distinguished from 'document', which simply refers to the information content, and 'archive', which is concerned with the historical dimension.

Also known as 'metadata tag'.

A tag is a keyword or term attributed to an information resource. It corresponds to a metadata value. It usually refers to uncontrolled, unstructured metadata values (such as those used for photo sharing in Flickr), but it is also used to refer to metadata values in general, in particular in its verbal form 'to tag'.

Tagging a document attaches values to it, which will enable its subsequent retrieval.

TWS is a temporary storage solution for Council of Europe electronic documents and records. It enables the quick production of links to documents so that those documents can be made accessible on the Council of Europe’s new websites.

Documents can only be stored in TWS for three years. They will then be stored in the Records Management System (RMS), a long-term storage system for electronic records. Unlike TWS, RMS is a structured records management system which is organised according to the Council of Europe’s functional classification scheme. Records are managed in RMS in accordance with the retention and disposal schedules. The creation of a retention and disposal schedule by an entity is a prerequisite for the roll-out of RMS.